For the trader of securities, it is very important to know what the best available prices are on the street in a timely manner and to be able to use the trading opportunities that these prices present before the window of opportunity closes. Nowhere is this more important than for bond trading. Typically, a Credit Default Swap trader receives information about bond prices in the form of emails. The bulk of these emails arrive within a very short period of time around the time when the markets open, and the information contained within these emails is valuable only for a limited period of time. It is common for traders to receive hundreds of these emails in the morning. Buried within these emails are often good trading opportunities.
In the conventional arrangement, the trader had to manually read through each of these emails to find out what the prevailing bond prices are being offered on the street. However, the trader often cannot read through all of these emails before the window of opportunity closes for taking advantage of the information in these emails. For every email the trader does not have time to read, he or she misses an opportunity to earn a profit.
Further, no rigid formatting convention for these types of emails exists. They are fairly unstructured and often differ significantly from one-another. For example, an email may have lines talking about an impending vacation and then may have lines stating, “by the way, I want to sell this particular bond at this particular price.” Also, the email may or may not provide all of the information commonly used to identify a particular bond. Therefore, lack of consistent formatting in emails presents a technical problem for extracting trading opportunity information from such emails with a relatively high rate of success.